Windows XP Professional on the Corporate Network

Windows XP Professional, because it’s designed as a replacement for Windows 2000 Professional, is designed to work well on corporate networks. Thus, it contains all the network and security features of Windows 2000 Professional, including

Support for IP Security (IPSec) to protect data being transmitted across VPNs

Kerberos v5 support for authentication

Group Policy settings for administering networks and users

Offline viewing of network data when not connected to the network

Synchronization of local and network files

Remote access configuration wizard

Microsoft and Novell NetWare network clients

Support for Active Directory (Microsoft’s directory service feature which helps to manage users and resources on large networks)

Disk quotas to prevent a few storage-hog users from running the server out of space